Online meetings are a convenient means for participants at remote or different locations to communicate with each other and to simultaneously review information, such as electronic documents or presentations, during the meeting. A typical online meeting or web seminar (webinar) allows one or more participants to view documents, video, or other information on devices, such as computers, mobile phones or devices, or other appliances, while simultaneously listening to audio content associated with the information.
Often times, the information viewed by participants during the online meeting is stored on a presenter device, such as computer, or on another device, such as a server, and the information displayed during the online meeting is controlled by the presenter while it is streamed to and viewed by the remote participants. For example, a presenter may provide access to content on his or her device desktop to other online meeting participants during an online meeting and that information may be streamed to participants during the meeting.
Although such real-time sharing of information from the presenter device to other participant devices during a presentation may work relatively well in some cases—for example, when all participants are connected to the presenter's local area network (LAN) using high bandwidth connections, such systems may not work well when one or more participants to the meeting connect to the online meeting using a mobile device with a relatively low bandwidth connection.
The bandwidth limitation of mobile device connections can cause network congestion, which may, in turn, affect the performance of the online meeting system. The congestion may also affect the performance of other applications using or attempting to use the same wireless bandwidth. Thus, online meting participants as well as others may experience sluggish network performance as a result of the online media streaming during the meeting.
In addition, use of mobile bandwidth to stream the information may increase costs associated with the meeting.
Accordingly, improved methods and systems for viewing content during an online meeting, are desired.
It will be appreciated that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of illustrated embodiments of the present invention.